If you already know about Dreamhost, you can fast forward to the Special! Discount! bit.

Here's the deal. Dreamhost is (in my opinion) a seriously kick-ass hosting service. I've been using them for three years now, and haven't had a single issue in that time. They offer more than most, for cheaper than most, and I haven't had more than a couple of minutes downtime on my site, total. I'm using the cheapest (L1) plan, and I haven't even come close to maxing out the limits. By an order of magnitude or two.

If you don't believe me (which is a perfectly reasonable thing), here's a recent thread from Ask Metafilter where loads of people say pretty much the same thing, and one from SH/SC at SA. [Update September 2006: Just a note to add that when one of my other sites was Dugg, Techcrunched, Ars Technicated, and basically inundated with traffic (upwards of a million visits in a week or so, all in) from all the Big Sites, it held up like a champ. No down time, no Digg-effect. I was impressed, and it makes me all the more inclined to stay with Dreamhost....] Here are the highlights of what they offer (for the cheapest L1 plan -- you can go up from there):

• $9.95 a month with no setup fee if you pay for a year initial
• $7.95 a month if you go for two years
• 4800 MB disk space, automatically increased by 40MB per week
• 120 GB per month automatically increased by 1 GB per week
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• 600 E-Mail Accounts (POP / IMAP)
• 75 Shell / FTP / E-Mail Accounts with all the usual goodies
• Unlimited Announcement and Discussion lists, and unlimited email aliases
• One free domain registration
• Unlimited domain and subdomain hosting
• PHP4/5, Full UNIX shell, Crontab, Full CGI, Ruby on Rails, Server side includes, CVS repository, etc etc
• Stats, one-click installs, a whole whack of other stuff

Deals are coming and going all the time, so it's entirely possible that you can get MORE! BETTER! than this, even, at this very moment.

As a Dreamhost user, you can refer other people, and get a small percentage of their registration fees as a referrer reward. I've posted about it a few times on my various sites, and as a result, quite a few people have used me as a referrer, and I've been able to cover my hosting costs for the past few years with those 'rewards'. Not a single person who has signed up through me has complained to me about the service. If they did, I'd post it here, I promise.

Anyone who knows me (or reads my stuff) should know how much I hate advertising. I don't think this deal is, exactly, and here's why. If I point you to what I think to be an excellent service (*points*), and I get some referral coin out of it (and am totally upfront about that fact), and you sign up and in turn become a referrer and get some cash from it in the future too, on top of getting some cheapo quality hosting, hey, everybody wins. Sounds like a pyramid scheme, but if it is, it's a virtuous one, and there's no marketing involved, beyond this little primer. It's personal, me to you, no middleman, and doesn't involve cluttering our online playground with ads all over the damn place. Dreamhost gets some more business as well, of course, but I've got no trouble at all recommending them. If they ever turn evil (as evil as Google, even), I replace this page with details of how and why. Easy-peasy.

Special Wonderchicken Discount!

One other swell thing that Dreamhost allows me to do is to give people I refer a special discount code, which will get them a cheaper price (shown before you cough up your credit card number) than the usual, which is awfully good already. The discount'll come out of my referrer rewards, but hey, we'll be helping each other out, here.

So: use me as your referrer, or enter the promo code 'gowonderchicken' (no quotes) during the checkout process, and the system will give you the following discounts when you sign up as a new Dreamhost customer:

Period	Level	Normal Price	Wonderchicken Discount!
Monthly	L1	$59.90 initial	$20.00
Yearly	L1	$119.40	$20.00
Two years	L1	$190.80	$40.00
Monthly	L2	$69.90 initial	$20.00
Yearly	L2	$239.40	$40.00
Two years	L2	$382.80	$60.00
Monthly	L3	$89.90 initial	$20.00
Yearly	L3	$479.40	$40.00
Two years	L3	$766.80	$60.00
Monthly	L4	$129.90 initial	$20.00
Yearly	L4	$959.40	$40.00
Two years	L4	$1534.80	$60.00

Bottom line : Say you go with the L1 plan for one year. Normal price upfront is $119.80. Use 'gowonderchicken' as your promo code, and you get it for $99.80 (20 bucks off). Woohoo! Go for two years, promo code gets it for you for $150.80 (40 bucks off). Double woohoo!

I wouldn't recommend the monthly plans, (the monthly plan fees above are for setup + first month, the others are grand totals for 1 year or 2 years) as you have to pay the setup fee and will therefore end up paying more for the year. Go for one year or two years from the get-go and they waive the setup fee.

Like I said earlier, the L1 plan, the cheapest one, has been way more than I've needed for this site, even with hosting audioblog mp3s from a few popular posts.

So here's the poop. If you

• Follow my referrer link, it'll give you a cookie marking me your referrer if you sign up. (If you've got an older cookie from a Dreamhost referral, that one wins, and I get no credit.) If you use my Discount Code (GOWONDERCHICKEN) I'll get a one-time credit (minus the discount I gave you). If you sign up without using my Discount Code, I'll get ongoing credits if you decide to stay with Dreamhost in future.
• Use as the referrer email address; I'll get ongoing credit if you stay with Dreamhost in the future (unless you use my Discount Code). This is the best result for me.
• Clear your cookies before you sign up, do not use the above email as your referrer, don't use my Discount Code, and you get good cheap hosting, and I get sweet bugger-all. That's OK, if that's the way you want to go.

Never say I don't treat you right, friends and neighbors!